“Is there a back door?” he asked. “Another way inside?”
She nodded.
“How do I get to it?” He pulled the handkerchief out of her mouth so she could answer, but remained ready to stuff it back in if she started to yell.
“There’s a path through the woods, on the side,” she said softly. She nodded toward the west side of the house. “The door leads into the garage. There’s a back door, too, but it leads from an enclosed patio. You can’t get to it without being seen from the house.”
“Right. Here we go then.” He started to stuff the handkerchief back in.
“Don’t,” she said. “I won’t say anything, I promise.”
“Since when can I trust your promises?” He replaced the handkerchief in her mouth, ignoring the hurt that lanced him at her injured look.
He took her arm and led her around the house toward the back door, keeping out of sight of anyone inside. His phone vibrated and he answered it.
“Recon Three, this is Recon One. Where are you?” Blessing spoke in a whisper, but his voice carried clearly in the silence around them.
“Outside the house. West side.”
“They’ve got us pinned down on the second floor. Looks like a rec room. Did you say there’s four of them?”
He looked to Leah for confirmation. Four? he mouthed. She nodded. “That’s right. Braeswood, Roland, and two others,” he said.
“It’s too high up to jump out of the window, though it may come to that,” Blessing said.
Leah tugged on his arm. He shook her off, but she tugged harder, her expression almost frantic. “Hang on a minute,” he said, and pressed the phone against his chest to mute it.
He jerked the gag from her mouth. “What is it?”
“If they’re in the rec room, there’s a dumbwaiter,” she said. “In the interior wall, behind the panel with the dartboard. It goes down to the garage.”
He pressed the phone to his ear again. “Check the panel behind the dartboard,” he said. “There’s a dumbwaiter that goes down to the garage.”
“Won’t they know to block it off?” Blessing asked.
Leah shook her head. Travis muted the phone again. “They know about it, but I don’t think they’ll think about it,” she said. “I’m the only one who uses it, when I unload groceries.”
“I’ve got the woman with me,” Travis said. “She says she’s the only one who ever uses the dumbwaiter—Braeswood and the others won’t remember it.”
“You don’t think she’s setting a trap for us?” Blessing asked.
“I don’t think so.” Maybe that was his old image of Leah, fooling him, but he had to trust his instincts now.
“Then we’ll have to chance it.” Blessing sounded older. Bone-weary. “If you can, station yourself to lay down cover fire.”
“There’s a side door in the garage that leads outside. I’ll cover you there.”
He and Leah repositioned to conceal themselves as near to the garage as he dared, taking cover first behind a propane tank, then behind a section of lattice fencing used to block trash cans from view. He half reclined, bracing his right hand on the fence. “Get down behind me,” he ordered her.
“If you have another weapon, I can shoot it,” she said, reminding him that he hadn’t replaced her gag after his phone call with Blessing.
She knew he carried a small revolver in an ankle holster. She had certainly seen him remove it enough times when he had come home to his Adams Morgan townhome where she had spent many nights. “You may have played me for a fool before,” he said. “But I’m not a big enough idiot to give a wanted felon a gun.”
Anger flashed in her eyes and she opened her mouth, then apparently thought better of whatever she had been about to say and remained silent. “Get down,” he ordered.
She did as he asked, reclining in the dirt behind him. The warmth of her body seeped into him, along with an awareness of the jut of her hip bone and the curve of her breast. He forced his attention back on the door. “Come on,” he muttered. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Long minutes passed in silence so intense he imagined he could hear the hum from the power line that connected the house with the transformer at the road. He pictured the team assembling in the garage, arriving one or two at a time via the dumbwaiter designed to carry parcels up from the garage to the living quarters. They would wait until everyone was in place before they made their exit.
“Why haven’t they come out yet?” Leah whispered, when he judged twenty minutes had passed. Too long. Braeswood and company would be wondering why things in the rec room were so quiet.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Just then, the door from the garage eased open. Blessing’s face, dark and glistening with sweat, peered out. Then the door burst all the way open and men poured out.
The first bullets thudded into the dirt around them, followed by the sickening sound of ammunition striking flesh. Heart racing, Travis scanned the area and located the source of the shots. Cursing, he fired off half a dozen quick rounds at the man stationed behind the tripod-mounted machine gun on the deck overlooking the garage. The felons must have figured out what was going on in the rec room and stationed themselves to ambush the agents as they emerged from the garage. Travis was too far away to get a good shot at them. All he succeeded in doing was attracting the shooter’s attention.
“Go!” Travis shouted, and pushed Leah ahead of him. “Run!” She started running and he took off after her. They fled the hail of bullets that bit into the trees around them and plowed the leaf litter. When she stumbled, he pulled her up and dragged her farther into the woods, running blindly, praying they wouldn’t be struck by the bullets that continued to rain around them.
He didn’t see the edge of the bluff until it was too late. One moment his booted foot struck dirt, the next the ground fell away beneath him. The last sound he remembered was Leah’s anguished scream, echoing over and over as they fell.
Leah had thought she was ready for death. In the past six months there had been times she had prayed to die. But falling off that cliff, gunfire echoing around her, the ground rushing up to meet her, she wanted only to live. Her hands bound behind her by the cuffs, she had only Travis’s strong arms to save her as he wrapped himself around her. She buried her face against his chest and prayed wordlessly, eyes closed against the fate that awaited.
They hit the ground hard. Her head struck the dirt and she rolled, a sharp ache in her shoulder. Stunned, she lay slumped against a tree trunk, aware of distant shouts overhead and the sound of the rushing creek below.
Travis! Frantic, she struggled to sit and looked around. He lay ten feet down the slope, his big body still, blood trickling from a cut on his forehead. Crawling, half sliding on the steep grade, she made her way to him. “Travis!” she called. She nudged him with the toe of her shoe. “Travis, wake up.”
The shouts overhead grew louder. She looked up toward the house, but trees blocked her view. Had Duane and the others seen them fall? Would they come down here to look for them? She leaned down, her face close to his, so that she could smell the clean scent of his soap, mingled with the burned cordite